For most of the running time of Godzilla vs. Kong, the two legendary titans were battling each other. That changed towards the film’s climatic final battle, when Mecha-Godzilla arrived on the scene, conceived of and controlled by the planet’s truest enemy (human beings, obviously), which made both Godzilla and Kong realize they weren’t enemies. In fact, in a certain light, they could be incredible teammates if called upon. Godzilla vs. Kong ended with the two behemoths tag-teaming Mecha-Godzilla and taking the metallic monster down. Now, in the first trailer for the follow-up, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the cinema’s two most iconic movie monsters are side-by-side again, this time against a mysterious foe that goes unnamed but is certain to be an even bigger challenge.
The new threat has been hidden beneath the surface of our world and is connected to the origins of both Godzilla and Kong, and Kong’s home, Skull Island. Godzilla vs Kong director Adam Wingard returns, along with stars Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, and Kaylee Hottle. Newcomers include Dan Stevens, Alex Ferns, and Fala Chen. Wingard directs from a script by Godzilla vs. Kong scribe Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett (You’re Next), and Jeremy Slater (Moon Knight).
Wingard is also once again working with Godzilla vs. Kong alums in cinematographer Ben Seresin, production designer Tom Hammock, editor Josh Schaeffer, and composers Tom Holkenborg and Antonio Di Iorio.
Check out the official trailer below. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire arrives on April 12, 2024:
For more on Warner Bros., Max, and more, check out these stories:
Featured image: Caption: KONG in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “GODZILLA x KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Godzilla Minus Onehas now arrived on U.S. shores, and for Godzilla lovers, catching the iconic kaiju on the biggest screen possible stateside is a no-brainer. Yet the reviews for the film are so positive even Godzilla agnostics might want to add the movie to their December watch list. “The result is nothing short of magical: a feast for the eyes, an entertaining epic in every sense of the word,” writes the Washington Post‘s Lucas Trevor. “Godzilla Minus One isn’t just a good Godzilla movie. It’s an excellent Godzilla movie – arguably among the best ever to grace the screen,” says ReelViews James Berardinelli.
Writer/director Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One is the first domestic Japanese Godzilla film in seven years, taking us back to post-war Japan as the iconic kaiju surfaces from the ocean depths to unleash holy hell on a populace still reckoning with the ravages of World War II, a nation that was “baptized in the horrific power of the atom bomb” as the film’s press materials state.
It’s a decidedly different Godzilla from the American incarnations we’ve seen in Godzilla vs. Kong(2021) and Godzilla (2014), taking us back to Godzilla’s roots as a metaphor for Japan’s postwar agony and grief while balancing the beast’s lust for carnage and destruction with a human-level story that focuses on the lives of the people beneath Godzilla’s feet.
Yamazaki is as sure as a hand as you could have hoped for to bring Godzilla back home, a brilliant VFX artist and CG animator in his own right, having worked on The Great War of Archimedes and Lupin III: The First. He’s no stranger to the king of the monsters, either; this is the third time he’s depicted the most iconic movie monster of them all, having deployed Godzilla in Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 (2007) and Godzilla the Ride (2021).
Godzilla Minus One stars Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, and Kuranosuke Sasaki.
Let’s take a peek at what some of the critics are saying. Godzilla Minus One is in theaters now.
REVIEW: Going back to basics, Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus One” is a lean Spielbergian period drama that brings the Toho titan back to its former glory.
Godzilla Minus One, one of the best entries in the franchise, goes back to basics for a post-war monster movie with a human focus and killer effects. @eli_gonzalez11‘s review: https://t.co/cAp7LPitk7
The first trailer for George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has arrived, easily one of 2024’s most feverishly awaited films. Furiosa arrives nine years after Miller’s nearly flawless Fury Road, which starred Tom Hardy as the titular Max and an unbelievable Charlize Theron as Furiosa, the ferocious, fearless heroine who was easily the heart and soul of the movie. Furiosa’s exploits in Fury Road were significant—risking life and what was left of her limbs, she freed a gaggle of female prisoners from Immortan Joe, the sadistic ruler of the citadel in the parched, post-apocalyptic wasteland of a ruined world. Furiosa will take us back and follow her in her younger years (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) when she was snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and ended up in the snares of Warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the leader of the great Biker Horde, and thus began her years-long struggle against the lunatics roaming the vast wasteland and vying for supremacy of a broken world.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is set 45 years after the collapse of society, and with a nifty opening text crawl (think of the iconic Star Wars crawl, only appropriately; the words here race at you like souped-up vehicles), we learn that the film is centered on Furiosa’s violent odyssey as she desperately tries to get back home. In order to do so, she’ll be required to master all things mechanical and survive a war between Warlord Dementus and Immortan Joe. The trailer is short on specifics, but it delivers glimpses of the ingenious practical effects and unparalleled stunts that made Fury Road a phenomenon and multiple Oscar winner.
Miller directs from a script he wrote alongside his Fury Road co-writer Nick Lathouris, and he’s built the world of Furiosa with plenty more Fury Road alums, including production designer Colin Gibson, costume designer Jenny Beavan, and makeup designer Lesley Vanderwalt, each of whom won an Oscar for their work on Fury Road.
Check out the trailer below. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga revs into theaters on May 24, 2024:
For more on Warner Bros., Max, and more, check out these stories:
Featured image: Caption: Anya Taylor-Joy in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Village Roadshow Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
You can now say “Beetlejuice” three times and know that, eventually, the supernatural misfit will appear soon. Tim Burton took to Instagram to announce that his sequel Beetlejuice 2 has wrapped filming. The conclusion to principal photography comes as welcome news to fans of his iconic original—the sequel had only two days left of filming but had to shut down during the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Burton told The Independentthat working on the sequel brought him back to the joy he felt making films.
“On this last one, Beetlejuice 2, I really enjoyed it,” he said. “I tried to strip everything and go back to the basics of working with good people and actors and puppets. It was kind of like going back to why I liked making movies.”
Burton directs the sequel from a script by Wednesday creators Miles Millar and Alfred Gough and sees the return of major stars from the original, including Beetlejuice himself, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz, and Catherine O’Hara as her mom, Delia Deetz. Newcomers include Jenna Ortega, as Lydia’s daughter, Astrid, Monica Bellucci as Beetlejuice’s wife, and Willem Dafoe, Justin Theroux, and Filipe Cates in undisclosed roles.
Keaton also echoed Burton’s sentiments in an interview with Empire Magazine.
“It has to be done as close to the way we made it the first time. Making stuff up, making stuff happen, improvising and riffing, but literally handmade stuff like people creating things with their hands and building something,” he said. “F**kin’ great. It’s the most fun I’ve had working on a movie in, I can’t tell you how long.”
Beetlejuice 2 currently has a release date of September 6, 2024.
Like so many of us, production designer Suzie Davies loved Emerald Fennel’s debut, Promising Young Woman. When she heard that the actress-turned-director planned a sex-drenched thriller called Saltburn as a follow-up to her debut feature, Davies, Oscar-nominated for designing Mike Leigh’s lush period piece Mr. Turner, threw her hat in the ring. “I was like, ‘Let me get in the room with Emerald!'” she says. “My agent got me the script, I put a pitch together, and we got on straight away. Whenever I suggested something, Emerald was like, ‘bigger, bolder.’ Anything even slightly weird, she’d say, ‘Absolutely, that will work!'”
Saltburn (in select theaters now) stars Barry Keoghan, Oscar-nominated for The Banshees of Inisherin, as Oxford University misfit Oliver Quick. Invited by aristocratic classmate Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi of Euphoria and Priscilla) to spend the summer at his family’s palatial estate, Oliver insinuates himself with Felix’s narcissistic mother, father, sister and cousin (played respectively by Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver and Archie Madekwe) to ruinous effect.
Filmmakers shot Saltburn on location at Oxford University, where Fennel went to school, and at a 200-acre estate in northern England called Drayton House, which dates back to the 1200s and has never before been featured in a movie.
Speaking from her London home, Suzie explains how she reconfigured an ancient castle to serve Fennell’s pitch-black comedy-turned-tragedy of manners.
Oxford University seems posh at the start of the movie, but it’s nothing compared to “Saltburn.” When Felix arrives at the sprawling Catton estate for the summer, he’s dumbstruck by its sheer scale. What was your reaction the first time you saw this place?
Exactly the same as Oliver’s — I was blown away. It’s a beautiful long drive up to this house, this manor, this castle, I can’t even call it a house, and probably a mile long, through the most delicious countryside. We went in the springtime so everything’s green and vivid and lush. You see the house in the distance, and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger with layers of architecture every which way. Generations of families have lived there since 1066, so everyone’s added their bits — medieval, Georgian, Victorian.
Barry Keoghan is Oliver Quick in “Saltburn.” Courtesy of MGM and Amazon Studios.
Sounds like the house has a lot of personality.
This estate absolutely was a character, like it was smoking a cigarette and drinking a gin and tonic while leaning back — very confident and relaxed in its environment.
Using this formidable historic structure as a foundation, how much latitude did you have in re-shaping the home for the purposes of this film?
Rather than dealing with National Trust or English Heritage [saying] “Don’t touch anything, don’t paint anything,” this family let me run riot. When we got to the boys’ rooms, they were in the wrong colors and wrong configurations, so the family allowed us to paint the walls this lush, rich, basically red shiny glaze, change the tapestry, put up our own wallpaper, change the floor, rip out a bathroom, put in a dressing room, rip out a bedroom, put in another bathroom. That was really satisfying because you can use the idiosyncrasies of a real location to make something special with composited sets that look out the windows with great views. And this is a house with 127 rooms, so we had a lot to choose from!
Suzie Davies on the set of “Saltburn.” Courtesy MGM and Amazon Studios
Even the wallpaper draws you in.
I’m loving that you noticed the wallpaper because it isn’t just subtext. We did it with intention. For Oliver’s room, we used this brilliant wallpaper, a 1960s print, which you can see in close-up is a maze [pattern]. Felix’s room, we added a tapestry of ancient battle scenes of people slaying dragons. In the bathroom, the wallpaper mimics the muscles on Barry’s back, all sinews and muscle, with lovely marble-like wallpaper in the panels, which sort of looks like oil that’s dripping.
Dripping?
I had this idea that the film, toward the end, should look like an oil painting that’s dripping with the heat of the story.
The home’s vaulted ceilings, rich antique furniture, and million-dollar paintings define luxury, even though the aristocrats who live there seem to take it all for granted.
We added elements to make things even grander, but every time we made it grander, we also put in a slightly subversive element. The ballroom, with the beautiful flowers and the paintings, looks clean within an inch of its life, but there’s a fly strip hanging from the chandelier. Little things like that — the house needed to feel lived in.
A scene from “Saltburn.” Courtesy MGM.
The estate’s massive grounds include a maze-shaped garden where Oliver runs around with horns on his head during his wild nighttime masquerade party. Was this maze part of the property when you arrived?
No. The [overhead] top shot was CG, and the maze [on the ground] was designed by this amazing designer, Adrian Fisher. We worked out how our characters would run and then plopped in these hedges so that when you’re in the middle of the maze — that’s all construction. We moved probably twenty meters of real hedges in and out, and because [the big sequence] took place at night, we could make those runs quite short.
Barry Keoghan in “Saltburn.” Courtesy MGM.
At the center of the maze stands this eerie statue of a minotaur, the half-man-half-bull creature of Greek mythology. Did you sculpt the minotaur from scratch?
We found this brilliant artist Nicola Hicks, and she gave us permission to use her artwork as inspiration. From there, we developed our minotaur, which we called Big Willy for obvious reasons. It was sculpted out of polystyrene, which, funny enough, is how I started out in the industry as a polystyrene sculptor. There are four other minotaurs at each point of the maze from our brilliant team of makers in the art department, but I must admit I couldn’t help but get myself in there, covered in paint.
Bad things happen at the party, and the situation goes downhill from there. How did color, especially the color red, figure into your design as a way of intensifying the drama.?
We used every tone — dark red, dried blood red, neon red. At one point, I was going to paint the walls, but there was some ornate plasterwork on the panels in that breakfast room, which would have cost too much time and money to paint around. But it was a bland room, and we wanted to bring more color into the film. Then I noticed the room had an orange-red carpet. “What can we do with this?” Fried eggs were a big part of one sequence, so I started thinking about the white and yellow and the little bit of red you see in a fried egg, and we made these red-striped chair fabrics.
And the curtains?
Massive curtains were a way for me to bring some color in. We got this shot silk fabric…
What’s shot silk?
Raw silk. If you run your hands over shot silk, you feel bumps and lumps, and it’s thicker than the smooth silk you’d wear as a shirt.
So you make enormous shot silk curtains and…
When Emerald came in, the sun was shining through the window, and this orange-red sheer silk curtain looked amazing. She decided this was our chance to go orange-red in the scene where they’re all losing it.
When the curtains are drawn, the entire room takes on this reddish hue, amplifying the characters’ unhinged emotions. It must have been exciting to orchestrate all these tones and details in service of Emerald Fennel’s dark vision?
It’s great when a director uses detail as well as Emerald does. There’s that scene where Oliver pours the wine, and we see wine seeping through the white tablecloth. Or the Pierrot Box, with the little characters dancing.
The spooky marionette theater. Where did you find that?
We made it.
Really!
The Pierrot box is this thing that usually has a little dancing clown in it. We made this box with our little characters dancing but couldn’t quite get the mechanism to work. When Emerald saw it, she liked that it was a bit jolty and a bit mad when they did their little dance. Weird or rude, that’s what Emerald wanted in her storytelling. Weird or rude.
Featured image: Barry Keoghan is Oliver Quick in “Saltburn.” Courtesy of MGM and Amazon Studios.
The Walt Disney Company celebrates its 100th anniversary this year and, in honor of the milestone, released a new animated feature, Wish, just before Thanksgiving. Directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn (both of Frozen) and written by Jennifer Lee and Allison More, Wish is set centuries ago in the magical Spanish Mediterranean island kingdom of Rosas. Until heroine Asha (Ariane DeBose) gets her bearings, the island’s magic is held in the hands of only one person, King Magnifico (Chris Pine), a megalomaniac who takes his subjects’ dearest wishes when they turn 18 on the premise of a promise to grant them at some undetermined date in the future. He has little to no intention of bringing most of the Rosas citizenry’s wishes to fruition, of course, but by causing them to forget what matters to them most, he maintains a docile population.
The film is peppered with references to Disney films past. Seventeen-year-old Asha’s gaggle of adolescent pals are reminiscent of the seven dwarfs. As a self-congratulatory villain, Magnifico could have taken his notes on how to rule from Jafar of Aladdin. And throughout the film, the score’s refrain is a new melody that intentionally harkens back to the signature Disney tune from it’s second animated feature, 1940’s Pinocchio, “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Wish is the first feature for composer David Metzger, who has had a twenty-five-year career at Disney as an orchestrator and arranger, and among his tasks was to both connect to Disney’s rich history and simultaneously create something brand new. “I think that was important, to nod to what the film is, but it’s its own unique theme,” he says.
Metzger, whose credits include Disenchanted, Frozen, and The Lion King, in addition to composing the score on Wish, worked with songwriters Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice to arrange and orchestrate the animation’s original soundtrack. By the time he had all of six weeks to compose the score, Metzger had already spent seven to eight months working on the songs, as well as planning how to get into them from the score and back out. “I think it helped me a lot, and I hope helped the film have more of a singular voice,” he says.
As far as this marking his composer debut, “it was honestly a dream come true,” Metzger says. “Needless to say, I was thrilled to have the opportunity, and on such a happy film. I really think it’s a joyful film, and I’m hoping that it brings happiness to people.” We got to speak with the composer about his favorite songs, historical references, and the process of composing for Wish’s most unusual character.
How did you work to make the music feel fresh but still keep it within the Disney ethos?
As far as trying to make it new and fresh, a lot of the time, that depends on what part of the world we’re dealing with and also what era. In the case of Wish, we were working on an island in the Mediterranean with heavy Spanish influences. I wanted to involve North African elements, as well. Rosas is a community where people come from all over. I used North African percussion, I used darbukas, I used ouds, a string guitar-like instrument. Bringing in the Spanish side of things, I used a lot of nylon-stringed Spanish guitars and cajón, which is a percussion instrument that’s been used in flamenco music quite a bit. It was a matter of trying, in the case of Wish, to establish the identity of where it was taking place.
What about placing us in the time period of Wish?
For the era, one of the instruments I used was an oboe d’amore, which is a Renaissance oboe, so it gives more of a historical feel to it than you might get if you just used a regular oboe. I also used a bass oboe, which is rarely used. As far as trying to tie into making it still sound like a Disney film, for me it’s a lot of orchestra. In particular, being the 100th-anniversary film, I was trying to tie in elements historically, and I did that through orchestration choices and also while composing. There were more notes, historically — it was busier music back in the day. In the modern world, it’s a little more whole notes and not quite as motion-driven. So, I was trying to use that as a tool to bring a cinematic vibe to the picture.
Speaking of back in the day, were you inspired by old Disney films while working?
Asha has her friends, the teens. When I was talking about the music with the directors before we even started writing, we discussed that section where you’re first meeting them, and there was an illusion there to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as each of her friends is characteristic of them. I didn’t use any themes, but I worked on so many Disney projects that I have copies of all these original scores, so before I even started writing, I went back and looked through the Snow White score and the Pinocchio score to see what I could borrow from that era, color-wise. I think if a person is listening closely, you’ll hear orchestration tendencies from 1937 that I tried to weave into the teen characters in particular.
When it comes to the soundtrack, one standout is the teens’ song, “Knowing What I Know Now,” as they make their plans against Magnifico.
One of the cool things about working on the songs was that I got to work with Julia Michaels and Ben Rice, the songwriters. They’re incredible. One of the things I had to work with on that song was that Ben is an amazing drummer. A lot of those percussion ideas are the ideas he’d played in his demo. Then, it was a matter of just expanding on those to bring in more percussionists. You’ll see on screen the characters will be playing candlesticks. It was a fun chance to find percussion instruments that sound like what they’re banging on. Probably the most fun thing for me on that song was the orchestra. I’m not much of a novelty orchestrator, but on that one, I thought, what the heck, I really wanted this big, deep, rounded sound. I normally use basses in my orchestra, but I actually brought in sixteen for that song. I had them split on both sides of the sound stage when we were recording. I also had sixteen cellos, so there’s this huge low end that permeates the whole sound stage. I had twelve French horns, whereas I normally have six. But the coolest, most unique thing we used was a contra-bass saxophone, which is about eight feet tall. It has this giant, low-end sound. You can’t really pick it out of a mix, but if you took it out of the mix, you’d notice something was missing.
Working on a project like this, do you have a personal favorite among the songs at the end of the process?
I think they’re all great songs, but the one I enjoyed the most might be the most oddball selection, and that’s the song that’s in the end credits. It’s called “A Wish Worth Making.” Julia and Ben wrote this beautiful melody with very simple chord changes. I was given that as a very stripped-down demo and was able to do my thing on it, which was figuring out a piano part that drives throughout the whole song. I only had an hour to do the string arrangement, but I kind of feel like it might have been the best string writing I’ve ever done in my career, which sounds weird to say. I just really felt it was one of those things that flowed out, and I had the opportunity to do counter lines in the strings that just seemed to work. Then Ben took another pass and put a lot of modern elements on top. I also really liked the way “At All Costs” turned out.
The Star is such a cute but key element to the film. How was composing for a character like that?
When I was brought onto the film, it was all storyboards. I hadn’t seen any animation for Star. I wondered, how is this going to turn out? As we were working on the songs, they were adding animation, and I realized this was going to turn out really well. At the end of the day, Star ended up being this wonderful animation with a range of facial expressions. Whereas I thought I’d have to do a lot of heavy lifting musically for Star, I ended up being able to sit in the background more than I ever would have dreamed because Star is so animated and, through facial expressions, transmits so much of the story. It’s a playful character, so it was fun to be able to do happy, fun things.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be the least bit surprised that Paddington and Paddington 2 director Paul King seems to have delivered a heartfelt and deliriously fun treat with Wonka. The early reactions are pouring in like a river of chocolate, and they’re deliciously positive.
Chalamet’s performance as the young chocolatier and confection wizard Willy Wonka is being hailed as a masterclass in charm and charisma, while the supporting cast and whimsical world in King’s conjuring of Wonka’s early years are all coming in for major praise. Production designer Nathan Crowley, in particular, is being name-checked for his contributions to the film’s sumptuous look.
Wonka reveals how the restless inventor of all things wondrous and sweet became the Willy Wonka that mesmerized millions of children, first through the pages of Roald Dahl’s iconic work and then in the 1971 adaptation Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, in which the playful, ever-so-slightly maniacal magician of chocolate was played by the great Gene Wilder.
Wonka is based on a script by King, Simon Farnaby, and Simon Rich and details how Chalamet’s Wonka faces a mountain of challenges to surmount, mainly in the form of a Chocolate Cartel that aims to thwart his dreams. Wonka includes a ton of music—Chalamet has seven songs himself—and a cast that includes Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa, Olivia Colman, Keegan-Michael Key, Sally Hawkins, Rowan Atkinson, Calah Lane, Colin O’Brien, Matt Lucas, Simon Farnaby, Natasha Rothwell, and Rufus Jones.
Let’s take a quick sweep of the Wonka early reactions below. Wonka hits theaters on December 15:
#Wonka cements Timothee Chalamet as one of the greatest up and coming actors. He’s magnetic, delightful & beautifully walks the line between naivete & cleverness. The film is filled with charm, joy & hope. It’s a perfect holiday film. It definitely has the rewatchability factor😍 pic.twitter.com/lldKjVOphm
#WonkaMovie is unabashedly silly, and a perfectly charming family film. Wonka’s world is brilliantly designed, capturing the wonder of his early years.
Embracing a quirky, heartwarming tone, Wonka is funny and sweet enough to overcome any minor bumps in the road. pic.twitter.com/WPCxA2r1A9
Timothée Chalamet is earning raves and being called “infinitely charming,” “intoxicating,” “pitch-perfect” and “a blast to watch” in the lead role of Willy Wonka: “Chalamet is reason alone to see ‘Wonka.'”https://t.co/1nbsgRZBYbpic.twitter.com/l0xPCoMF8c
#Wonka/ #WonkaMovie is a winning confection, filled with perfect amounts of charm, whimsy & poignancy, powered by pure imagination & bright, nimble musical numbers. Timothée Chalamet is a charisma factory. His full committal is intoxicating. Hugh Grant in exceptional IDGAF mode. pic.twitter.com/vjKJqqY6ll
#wonka is an instant holiday classic & a truly magical time at the movies 🥰 paul king’s whimsical style works as well here as it did in paddington, every musical number enchants, & the entire ensemble takes turns stealing the show, led by an endlessly charming timothée chalamet. pic.twitter.com/O887KYp4CY
#Wonka cements Timothee Chalamet as one of the greatest up and coming actors. He’s magnetic, delightful & beautifully walks the line between naivete & cleverness. The film is filled with charm, joy & hope. It’s a perfect holiday film. It definitely has the rewatchability factor😍 pic.twitter.com/lldKjVOphm
Timothée Chalamet is reason alone to see #WonkaMovie. He’s infinitely charming & a blast to watch.
The movie around him isn’t as good but it’s enjoyable. The story & tone fight against each other leaving it a bit muddled. And yet it’s filled with joy & the songs are delightful. pic.twitter.com/s1zlqtzIgv
Featured image: Caption: Caption: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Willy Wonka in Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures’ “WONKA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap Buittendijk
This Thanksgiving, the new animated musical comedy Wish premiered in the midst of the studio’s 100th anniversary, and the inspiration for the film can be encapsulated by “When You Wish Upon a Star,” a song made famous in Disney’s second full-length feature, 1940’s Pinocchio.
Wish takes place in the magical kingdom of Rosas, in the Iberian Peninsula, a crossroads attracting settlers from around the world. Asha (voiced by Ariana DeBose) loves her country, her family and friends, and her baby goat Valentino (Alan Tudyk). Like everyone in Rosas, she is loyal to her king, Magnifico (Chris Pine), a powerful wizard. People come from around the world to give Magnifico their wishes for safekeeping, but are their wishes safe with him? When Asha discovers he is more about control than compassion, she looks up into the night sky and makes a wish, which summons one single star. Star, a small, bright ball of energy, is the symbol of hope, courage, and joy and is the catalyst that changes everything for Asha, her family and friends, and all the people of Rosas.
A twenty-year veteran of Disney Feature Animation, Avneet Kaur was head of character and technical animation on Wish, Disney’s 62nd feature. She led the character assets department, which included teams for character modeling, rigging, simulation, and look development. The challenge for her and her team was to bring together the elements to create believable and compelling 3D computer-animated characters within an aesthetic inspired by the best traditionally animated Disney classics.
The Credits spoke to Kaur about how she achieved a look that was both cutting-edge and an homage to the studio’s great legacy.
There are a lot of references to Disney’s artistic history in Wish. Color stylist and concept artist Eyvind Earle’s designs for Sleeping Beauty and the impressionistic storybook illustration style that art director Gustaf Tenggren used on Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia are definitely inspirations.
Wish has a watercolor style with hand-drawn influences that was created by our artists at Disney Animation. We met with the directors early on, and our unifying vision was to craft a look for all the characters that were inspired by all of those beautiful illustrative works from films like those you just mentioned. The filmmakers really wanted the inspirational artwork to transition to the film’s characters very seamlessly, and this was made possible through a lot of research and development and some cutting edge artistry and technology that was pioneered for this film specifically. In pre-production, the leadership, which includes the directors, the production designer, and me as head of characters, the visual effects supervisor, and other heads of departments, all came together and worked for months to co-create what the stylized look for our film would be based on all of this inspiration.
How did the teams you were overseeing go forward in terms of achieving that goal?
We developed a new workflow that was one of its kind, because we had never done something like that before, and the goal was to accomplish the art direction developed specifically for this film. We did a series of experiments that ultimately resulted in a workflow made with compositing tools, and we also worked in the character asset departments and the teams I was overseeing. Together, we created a stylization package. All the departments worked together to come up with a system of handling all of the different situations in the film because the biggest challenge, in addition to the fact that it had to be inspired and do justice to all of the legacy we had, was the fact that we had many different ethnicities.
The story takes place in the Iberian peninsula, which historically was a crossroads of many different ethnicities and backgrounds. When you talk about designing cloth and hair, that means lots of different kinds to represent the different folks in the film, especially as it relates to crowd scenes.
The film takes place in the fictional trading port of Rosas, where people from all over the world gathered, and that was intentional because we wanted to reflect the diversity and represent many different ethnicities in the world. The ethnic diversity of the film was unprecedentedly huge, and the added stylization made it a very complex challenge. We had our main characters, our seven teens, and the many hundreds in the crowds were from four different ethnicities: African, European, East Asian, and Arab descent. Earlier on in the film, visual development collaborated very closely with my team on a design approach and strategy that respected the individuality and authenticity of these diverse ethnicities while making sure that the stylization felt cohesive. We prioritized the sense of modularity and multiculturalism for an outcome in the costumes and in the overall look. To have maximum diversity in garment, headgear, and hairstyle combinations, not just for the main characters but for the crowds, so our film includes many scenes of that rich diversity.
How did you break that down?
Based on the designs we had from visual development, our modeling team crafted 27 unique faces and diverse body types for the people of Rosas. Then, our simulation team, the one that tailors all of the clothing, created many modular garments that could be mixed and matched to create outfit variations within the ethnicities that we had because they demanded very specific designs. We were very careful about designing groups of accurate costumes. We had palettes of colors as well as patterns and textures that represented each ethnicity. For example, the characters of Arab descent were the ones heavily paired with jewelry, because that is a very integral part of their cultural identity. There was a lot of care from the design through the execution of the characters, so when they appeared on screen, you could recognize their heritage instantly. We made a conscious effort to be representative of the contemporary world today because our world is a melting pot of many different cultures and ethnicities, and that was in the spirit of looking forward to the next 100 years of Disney, as much as to pay homage to the past 100 years.
The crowd scenes are also a great way to reflect the aesthetic of the multiplane camera, used to such great effect in Pinocchio in 1940, in a modern way.
We created something that captured, as much as possible, the look of the multiplane camera by staging crowds in the foreground, mid-ground, and all the way to the background, in layers, with the very last layer almost blending with the architecture and the coloring of the world around it. That was absolutely intentional, not only to create the right art directional effect but to give the right importance to the foreground characters. As we get closer to the background, we lose some detail, which gives it a more watercolor feel and brings the film together visually.
What did you realize from studying Disney’s history that will help you going forward?
I’ve been at Disney Animation for almost 20 years now, and I had the honor to work through many wonderful CG films. The one thing I’ve realized is we just keep pushing the limits of what we are able to create on every single film. Wish is being released at the 100-year anniversary, and it pays homage to our past 100 years of Disney legacy, but it has a spirit and heart of its own. Every time you are presented with a new challenge to make a film like this at Disney Animation, you almost have to start on a new slate. The tools and techniques, the philosophy of creating all of that, is a brand new challenge in every film. Every film pushes the envelope of what we can do that we haven’t done before. That is something I really love about Disney.
Wish is in theaters nationwide.
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Before Barbie, before producing Bruno Mars and Adele, before winning an Oscar for co-writing Lady Gaga’s duet “Shallow” for A Star Is Born, Mark Ronson made a living in New York City as a deejay pulling from his encyclopedic knowledge of musical genres from many eras. Ronson’s talents earned wide acclaim when he co-produced Amy Winehouse’s breakthrough album “Back to Black” in 2006. Since then, Ronson and his frequent collaborator Andrew Wyatt have gained a reputation as studio-savvy hitmakers in collaboration with a wide range of high-wattage talent.
So it made perfect sense when filmmaker Greta Gerwig enlisted Ronson and “Shallow” co-writer Wyatt to oversee the music for Barbie and its companion “Barbie: The Soundtrack” album. Together, they produced the movie’s effervescent tunes featuring pop stars Charli XCX, Nicki Minaj, Haim, Sam Smith, Pink Pantheress, Khalid, and Billie Eilish. The result was 11 Grammy Award nominations.
Speaking from Los Angeles, Ronson and Wyatt talked about their love of 80s-era synths and the experience of being in the recording studio with Ryan Gosling as he belted out Barbie‘s big power ballad “I’m Just Ken.”
You guys usually write and produce songs for pop stars. What’s the difference between collaborating on an album with a singer versus the way you created music for the Barbie movie?
Mark: A lot of time we work with brilliant artists who come in with an idea: “I just broke up with my boyfriend, and I need to get this emotion out” or “I just came up with this funny line,” someone else delivers the inspiration to you. But sometimes you show up at the studio thinking, “What can I possibly say today that I haven’t said before?” When you get a script like Barbie, it’s so emotive; your brain goes to places it never would have gone, and that’s a real gift for a songwriter. As soon as Andrew and I read the script and had our initial conversations with Greta, music started to come out of us.
Greta Gerwig loved her Barbie dolls during the eighties. Did the music from that time period influence your sound?
Mark: Maybe in some ways. With the Cold War still happening, Reagan and so forth, the eighties were kind of the heyday of American triumphalism, so we naturally gravitated to that.
And that eighties synth feel seems to come through in bouncy numbers like “Hey Blondie” and “Speed Drive.”
Mark: 80s synths have never gone away; they just keep evolving in contemporary pop. The eighties mean so many things from Duran Duran to Herbie Hancock’s “Rocket,” but it also means some very rich scores from [film composers] Vangelis and Maurice Jaubert and David Grusin, who were like: “We’ve been using orchestras for 70 years; let’s try something else and see if we can get the same emotive-ness with these other instruments.” Greta loved the emotional wallop and the romance of the orchestra, but she also loved the more synth-y stuff. Andrew and I were just trying to play in this place where we could weave these things together.
Given your collective track record as producers and songwriters, was it an easy sell to get major stars like Dua Lipa, Nicki Minaj, and Billie Eilish on board with Barbie?
Mark: Greta was the easy sell. Especially with younger artists, they’ve grown up with Lady Bird and Little Women so everybody was excited to come to the table because of Greta.
Creatively, what came first?
Mark: Our first marching orders were to write a dance number because they were going to film it soon and were going into choreography rehearsals. With Dance The Night, Andrew and I have both worked with Dua [Lipa], and it seemed obvious: Who else is going to do the killer dance sequence like her? She put her whole boot through the genre of modern disco, so that was really exciting.
It’s incredibly catchy. Who else stands out?
Mark: Well, we didn’t produce every song. On “What Was I Made For?” we just did the string arrangement, but as soon as we heard the first demo from Billy [Eilish], we were like, “Wow, I can’t believe she watched twenty-five minutes of the film and cut right to the heart of Barbie’s experience.”
“I’m Just Ken” has turned out to be the movie’s big showstopper, with Ryan Gosling belting out this emotional power ballad. How did that song come together?
Mark: The Ken character got under our skin as soon as we read the script. Everybody can empathize with the loser. We were just trying to write something that made you feel for this guy, so one day, I was walking to the studio, and I thought of the line, “I’m just Ken; anywhere else, I’d be a ten.” I made a little chorus idea, sent it over to Andrew and he came up with the verse.
Greta Gerwig liked “I’m Just Ken” so much that she rewrote the script to make room for it in the third act. That must have been gratifying.
Mark: Yeah, of course. We’re working with Greta and with [Barbie co-writer] Noah Baumbach, who are kind of comic geniuses with words. So Andrew and I were like, “Oh, they think our words are good enough that we’re not going to ruin their movie if they literally change the entire third act to accommodate this thing.” When they sent us storyboards with our lyrics and a drawing of Ryan on the bed singing, you go, “Oh s***, this is real!”
What’s it like working with Ryan Gosling in the studio?
Andrew: Ryan’s a talented vocalist, so he was easy. I don’t think we did more than a couple of takes. We’ve been doing this stuff a long time, and sometimes, at the end of a session, you go, “Boy, I hope we can make this sound good.” Including my own vocals, I should say. But with Ryan, we just did a few takes, and the sound was already there. We were quite blown away.
Mark: Ryan was in the vocal booth behind this glass window. You don’t want to stare, but I’d look over occasionally and see that he was really far back from the microphone. First rule, producing 101, is to get the singer as close to the microphone as you can so you can go directly to the feeling. But I realized Ryan was singing as if it were both a mike and a camera. He used his whole body, kind of what opera singers did back in the day at Carnegie Hall. Ryan performed that song with every bit of Ken in him.
You recorded him in London?
Mark: Yeah, we went to London because we only had three hours to get this song done in between Ryan’s insane workouts and dance rehearsals. Later, we also recorded the other guys on Skype singing the background, “And I’m enough!” Andrew sang backgrounds, too
Andrew: That was fun.
In addition to all these soundtrack tunes, you also composed the score, which plays underneath that poignant scene when Margot Robbie’s “Barbie” meets Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), inventor of the Barbie doll. What were you aiming for in that sequence?
Mark: Greta was like, “I need to be crying here,” so we did probably like seventeen drafts of that thing until we got it right. The music couldn’t get in the way of dialogue, so we used a lot of synths and sound pads to swirl around it, and choirs, and the orchestra, and a glass harmonica, which is this beautiful droning instrument. We knew the emotional crux of the film was in some ways on our shoulders, so on our last pull-out-our-hair night, Andrew sat at the keyboard for the longest time, just watching this scene over and over.
L-r: Rhea Perlman and Margot Robbie in “Barbie.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
Tweaking the music until. . .
Mark: Tweaking until we were f***ing making ourselves cry.
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING as Ken and MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap Buitendijk
Beyond appreciation from critics and audiences alike for its compelling screenplay and gorgeous cinematography, Far From Heaven and Carol director Todd Haynes’s new release May December is getting awards buzz for the performances by its magnetic three leads. The film stars Haynes muse Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, and Charles Melton as three very complicated, sometimes unlikeable characters that consistently shift the audience’s allegiances. The film is loosely based on the real-life tabloid scandal of 35-year-old teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, her sexual relationship with a 12-year-old 6th grader, and their subsequent marriage. In May December, however, screenwriter Samy Burch mines that story for a narrative that is, by turns, fascinating, funny, appalling, and awkward. All that makes for a memorable character study and a great cinematic experience.
The Credits caught up with Haynes to talk about his new film, the breathtaking scenes between Portman and Moore, the inspired casting of Charles Melton, his surprise at how audiences have received the movie and more.
The film walks a really impressive line in terms of tone. How did you work with screenwriter Samy Burch to find humor and build characters that are unlikable but fascinating and compelling enough to pull the audience in and keep them guessing?
Truly, that was all happening in Samy’s script and in her characters and how she built them. That’s not to say that there weren’t notes and changes, revisions and a discussion that went on between Sammy and myself and with Natalie and Julianne, who had brilliant notes. This is just such an incredibly coherent and confident piece of work. What wasn’t necessarily there was the stylistic component that would be part of the film, but what the script did was it trusted the audience to interpret and read and say, “Wait a minute. What?” and keep shifting how they felt about characters as events unfolded. So what my job was, the job I gave myself by taking this on, was to try to find language in a movie version of this script that would give freedom to that kind of trust in the viewer and, in fact, demand the viewer to be thinking and revising their thinking through the course of the film.
May December. (L to R) Natalie Portman as Elizabeth, Julianne Moore as Gracie, Todd Haynes (Director) on the set of May December. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
To keep that tone and keep audiences fascinated took collaborating with every single below-the-line artist. Who were some of the MVPs in that regard?
That’s such a great invitation for me to gush about the creative team that brought it all to life and filled in all of those elements. It started with Sam Lisenco, the production designer. What’s interesting about my creative team is these are a lot of new relationships for me, out of circumstance and timing and a variety of reasons. This is the first film that Sam designed for me. He and I had developed another project that didn’t happen, and my fall opened up. We checked with Natalie and Julianne, and they both had this little sliver in the fall last year that was available, so we jumped on it. One thing led to the next, in the way movies happen, and the team all kept filling in, and in many ways, making so much more concrete and specific what this movie was going to be. Some of it was by sheer accident.
May December, L to R: Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo with Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
How did all that take shape?
Well, the film, based on the narrative, had to take place in May, but it was set in Camden, Maine. We couldn’t possibly shoot the movie in the late fall in Camden, Maine, or the eastern seaboard for May, so we had to think of a different location. Sam and I went to Savannah, Georgia, in August and started to scout. It was through instinct and intuition and circumstance that all these things started to fill out. Ed Lachman, who’s been shooting my films so gorgeously and is just a master and a dear friend, was going to shoot this, and then he injured his leg. I had to replace him very late in the game. I thought of Chris Blauvelt, whose work I’d been watching so closely and with such incredible admiration, especially the stuff he’d done with my friend Kelly Reichardt, all in my backyard of Portland, Oregon. Also, April Napier, the costume designer on May December, I’d never worked with before, and she came from Kelly’s movies and had worked with Chris and was available. Those kinds of things all started to fill in.
May December, L to R: Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry with Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix
Charles Melton really represents transformation in the film, and he’s so good it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing that character.
Finding Charles Melton was one of the most essential creative choices in this film. He was an actor whose work I didn’t know, and it was his reading on tape that informed me. It gave me insight into Joe that was way ahead of me in how he understood this character, but it enabled me to see the past story and the present story in the same body of this man.
May December, L to R: Charles Melton as Joe, Todd Haynes Director and Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
The film plays with the idea of femininity and gender roles in a really interesting way.
This is an inverted world where women’s desires and wills are driving the story, and I don’t find that this is any kind of correction of patriarchal power. I think this is a usurpation of patriarchal power by women against men, but it’s the same kind of power. It’s the older woman/younger man relationship that is at the core of this story and this question, and so too is the beauty of the young man and how that has also been a force in Western society and culture and something that negates or blurs the ethical questions around it. It certainly did in the Greco-Roman era, but even in this story, or at least in the mythology that you suspect is shared, the internal narrative Gracie and Joe have, where he’s some kind of knight in shining armor and this handsome young adolescent boy who is going to come and save the poor princess in the tower.
May December, L to R: Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo with Charles Melton as Joe. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix
The eternal ingenue.
Exactly. But that’s a way of denying the age difference and the power discrepancy between these two people, pretending to endow him with all this power. And again, that’s another aspect of patriarchal culture is endowing the man with all the power, even if he’s 13 years old. So it’s a complex, disturbing, but ultimately revelatory story about culture, and it has inversions that are surprising and humorous and disturbing again, and then it has this sense of hope, I think, all oriented around Charles and his kids, and where they may go from here.
The best quality of May December, however awkward or uncomfortable the film may make people feel, is that people are still choosing to see it, enjoying it, asking questions, and thinking about it.
What’s weird is people are somehow digging that right now, and I don’t necessarily think that’s how I would have taken the temperature of our contemporary culture, that people are comfortable being uncertain and asking big moral questions about things. It’s been really exciting to see that audiences are interested in going to this place. It’s very cool.
May December streams on currently in select art house theaters, and streams on Netflix on December 1st.
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Featured image: May December. (L to R) Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry and Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo in May December. Cr. Francois Duhamel / courtesy of Netflix
James Cameron and his team are busily working on the Avatar sequels, a statement that has been true for a long time now. Cameron revealed during a recent press conference in New Zealand moderated by 1News chief correspondent John Campbell that Avatar 3 is in a very crucial, very busy post-production phase at the moment.
“We’re into a very hectic two years of post-production right now,” Cameron told Campbell about the third film in his decades-spanning franchise. “So it will be Christmas of 2025.”
The updated timeline for the release of the final three films in Cameron’s sci-fi saga is this: Avatar 3 is now slated to open on December 19, 2025; Avatar 4 is set for December 21, 2029; and Avatar 5 is scheduled to conclude the franchise on December 19, 2031—that’s 22 years after the original 2009 film premiered.
Cameron is one of Hollywood’s most patient directors, and time and again, his patience has been proven an asset rather than a liability. There were many doubts about whether the second film in the franchise, 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water, would bring people into the theater 13 years after the original. The Way of Water went on to become a massive hit and is now the third-highest-grossing film in history.
There are far fewer people questioning whether there’s still an interest in the alien world that Cameron and his team have conjured for Avatar 3, but the time these films take to produce didn’t stop star Zoe Saldaña from having some fun with it.
“Great! I’m gonna be 53 when the last Avatar comes out,” Saldaña joked on Instagram after the new release plan was announced. “I was 27 when I shot the very first Avatar.”
Cameron also revealed that he will officially become a New Zealand citizen in 2024 (he’s been working in the country since 2005 when the original Avatar started development) and that all the remaining films will be made in the country.
Longtime Avatar producer Jon Landau teased that Avatar 3 will introduce a more militaristic race of Na’vi known as the Ash People, whose leader will be played by Game of Thrones star and Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter Oona Chaplin.
Speaking to Empire Magazine, Landau explained the Ash People this way: “There are good humans and there are bad humans. It’s the same thing on the Na’vi side. Oftentimes, people don’t see themselves as bad. What is the root cause of how they evolve into what we perceive as bad? Maybe there are other factors there that we aren’t aware of.”
You can watch Cameron’s full press conference here.
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At Monday night’s Gotham Awards, the annual celebration of independent film, Priscillastar Cailee Spaeny managed to drop a juicy piece of news for a film that’s decidedly not an indie. Spaeny is a featured player in Fede Alvarez‘s upcoming Alien: Romulus, a fresh entry in one of the most iconic sci-fi franchises of them all. We’ve known for a while that Romulus was billed as a standalone film within the broader Alien universe, but now Spaeny revealed to Variety precisely where Romulus will be set in the franchise and how key creators from the previous films are pitching in.
“It’s supposed to slot in between the first movie and the second movie,” Spaeny told Variety. “They brought the same team from Aliens, the James Cameron film. The same people who built those xenomorphs actually came on and built ours. So getting to see the original design with the original people who have been working on these films for 45-plus years and has been so much of their life has been really incredible.”
The franchise began, of course, with Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 Alien, which made an action star of Sigourney Weaver as her Ellen Ripley battled and eventually vanquished the aforementioned xenomorph after a grueling duel aboard the spaceship the USCSS Nostromo. James Cameron picked up the story seven years later with Aliens, which followed Ripley joining a military mission to a space colony to investigate a xenomorph attack. Romulus slotting between these two films could give it license to connect to these major events in the franchise.
Spaeny reminded Variety that her first film was the 2018 big-budget sci-fi romp Pacific Rim: Uprising, so working on Romulus brought her back to her big breakthrough.
“I feel like I’m going back to that world,” Spaney told Variety. “And I have so much fun. I like trying to do as many different things as I can. So I swapped my high heels and my beehive for spacesuits and lots of wire work. … I love watching those old ‘70s, ‘80s action sci-fi films. And I’m such a fan of that IP and Sigourney Weaver. It’s legendary to get to be a part of it.”
You can see Spaeny in those high heels and beehive in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which is playing in select theaters now.
Jacob Elordi is Elvis and Cailee Spaeny is Priscilla. Courtesy A24.
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Taylor Swift is giving Swifties a birthday gift—on her birthday—because the superstar is a giver. Swift announced that Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour film will be released for streaming on December 13, and it will include three new songs that weren’t captured in the film’s theatrical release—”Wildest Dreams,” “The Archer,” and “Long Live.”
Swift took to her social media accounts to reveal the news the morning after she performed the final date of her world-conquering tour in Brazil.
Hi! Well, so, basically I have a birthday coming up and I was thinking a fun way to celebrate the year we’ve had together would be to make The Eras Tour Concert Film available for you to watch at home! Very happy to be able to tell you that the extended version of the film… pic.twitter.com/JTpl0tz1uG
The streamers with logos on Swift’s website where you can stream the film are currently Apple TV, Prime Video, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, and Xfinity.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour documents her historic tour in pointillist fashion, running a meaty two hours and 48 minutes (now longer, with the added songs), giving her legion of Swifties the kind of backstage access most could only dream of.
“I can’t thank you enough for wanting to see this film that so vividly captures my favorite adventure I’ve ever been a part of: The Eras Tour,” Swift wrote an Instagram post when the film was released in theaters. “And the best part is, it’s an adventure we’re still on together.” At the world premiere of the film at the Grove in Los Angeles on October 11, she said made sure fans knew how much the film was about them. “I think that you’ll see that you’re absolutely a main character in the film because it was your magic and your attention to detail and your sense of humor and the ways that you lean into what I’m doing and the music I create.”
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Featured image: GLENDALE, ARIZONA – MARCH 17: Editorial use only and no commercial use at any time. No use on publication covers is permitted after August 9, 2023. Taylor Swift performs onstage for the opening night of “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour” at State Farm Stadium on March 17, 2023 in Swift City, ERAzona (Glendale, Arizona). The city of Glendale, Arizona was ceremonially renamed to Swift City for March 17-18 in honor of The Eras Tour. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)
The first trailer for J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow has arrived, revealing a glimpse at Bayona’s take on one of the most notorious aviation disasters and stories of survival of all time, the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972 that was carrying a rugby team. The plane crashed in the Andes, with only 29 out of 45 passengers surviving. For those who made it onto the ground alive, their challenges were only beginning, as the brutal high Andean environment pushed them to their limits and forced the survivors into making some heartbreaking decisions to carry on. Their story was previously dramatized in director Frank Marshall’s 1993 film Alive, which starred Ethan Hawke.
Bayona directs from a script he co-wrote with Nicolás Casariego, Jamie Marques-Olearraga, and Bernat Vilaplana, based on a book by Pablo Vierci. Spain has already chosen Society of Snow for entry for this year’s Best International Film Oscar.
The film has been a decade in the making for Bayona, who was determined to film it in Spanish with an unknown cast. “It was important to be as close to reality as possible,” Bayona told IndieWire. “It was also important to have a cast that will speak using their accents, an unknown cast, because the more unknown the faces were, the more realistic the approach will be.” The cast includes Enzo Vogrincic, Agustín Pardella, Matías Recalt, Esteban Bigliardi, Diego Vegezzi, Fernando Contigiani García, Esteban Kukuriczka, Rafael Federman, Francisco Romero, Valentino Alonso, Tomás Wolf, Agustín Della Corte, Felipe Otaño, Andy Pruss, Blas Polidori, Felipe Ramusio, and Simón Hempe.
Bayona got experience shooting major blockbusters—Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and two episodes of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power—which gave him the large-scale chops he needed to complete this incredibly difficult shoot. “We thought we were going to be shooting this much sooner,” Bayona told IndieWire. “But this is the journey. And what we shot in Hollywood allowed us to to be shooting Society of the Snow the way we wanted to do it.”
Check out the trailer below. Society of the Snow hits select theaters in December, then Netflix on January 4.
Here’s the official synopsis:
In 1972, the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, chartered to fly a rugby team to Chile, catastrophically crashes on a glacier in the heart of the Andes. Only 29 of the 45 passengers survived the crash and finding themselves in one of the world’s toughest environments, they are forced to resort to extreme measures to stay alive.
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Many major players wanted Kim Kardashian’s The Fifth Wheel, but Netflix has won the honor.
Deadlinereports that Netflix emerged victorious after a very competitive bidding war that saw five bids from suitors, including streamers and theatrical distributors. The Fifth Wheel will star Kardashian and was written by Janine Brito and Paula Pell, the latter of whom will produce alongside Kardashian. Deadline‘s reporting includes intel that Kardashian was very involved in the process of selling the female-driven comedy, appearing at the pitch meetings.
Little is known about Kardashian’s project, except that she will play the titular fifth wheel and star alongside an ensemble female cast. Deadline also writes that the speed with which this all happened was remarkable—Pell and Brito conceived the idea, pitched Kardashian “almost immediately after the strike ended,” and within days, they presented their package to the market, and it quickly became the first post-strike sale.
Kardashian’s production of The Fifth Wheel brings her considerable marketing savvy and clout to the project. The Fifth Wheel landed in Netflix’s mid-budget tier, scooped up by Niija Kuykendall at the streamer. It joins other mid-budget films like the romance Lonely Planet, starring Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth; the romantic comedy A Family Affair, starring Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, and Joey King; and Dan Levy’s directorial debut Good Grief, which stars Levy, Ruth Nega, Himesh Patel, and Luke Evans, and Tyler Perry’s Six Triple Eight starring Kerry Washington.
Kardashian recently received the best acting notices of her career after her performance as a publicist in the most recent season of FX’s American Horror Story. In Pell, Kardashian is working with one of the most seasoned comedy writers out there, having worked on SNL and then 30 Rock and penning the sibling comedy Sisters, starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Brito wrote on NBC’s Mr. Mayor, stars in the Peacock series Girls5Eva , and appeared in Netflix’s Wine Country. Pell and Brito are married.
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Featured image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK – APRIL 25: Kim Kardashian speaks onstage at the 2023 TIME100 Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 25, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME)
Good news, symbiote fans! Tom Hardy has revealed that production on Venom 3 is back at it. Hardy’s Eddie Brock and his alien alter ego Venom will be serving up a fresh film in late 2024.
Hardy took to social media this past Friday to share a photo and announce that production on the third film in the franchise has started back up again thanks to the resolution of the 118-day actors strike.
“The Last dance — thankfully we are back to shooting,” Hardy wrote in an Instagram post, which showed a photo of himself, co-writer/director Kelly Marcel, and stunt double Jacob Tomuri. “It’s been and continues to be a lot of fun this journey — there’s always hard turns to burn when we work but doesn’t feel as hard when you love what you do and when you know you have great material and the support at all sides, of a great team.”
Here’s the image Hardy shared:
L-r: Kelly Marcel, Tom Hardy, and Jacob Tomuri. Courtesy Tom Hardy.
Hardy paid special mention to Marcel, who is a longtime Venom scribe and is now finally directing a feature herself:
“I want to mention very briefly how proud of my director, writing partner and dear friend Kelly Marcel I am,” Hardy wrote, “watching you taking the helm on this one fills me with pride, it is an honour. Trust your gut, your instincts are always spot on.”
Venom 3 will find Hardy’s Eddie Brock/Venom mixing it up with some new friends, including Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The film was initially slated for a July 12, 2024, release date, but the dual strikes pushed it back, so now you can expect it on November 8, 2024.
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A maverick teacher challenges the norms at an elementary school in the border town of Matamoros in northern Mexico. Such is the fact-based story that unfolds in Radical (in theaters now), led by Mexican star Eugenio Derbez (Coda, Instructions Not Included) in a film directed by Chris Zalla (Blood of My Blood).
The teacher, Sergio Juarez Correa (Derbez), aims to teach his students lessons that will help them navigate the difficult world outside the classroom, with their school situated along the Rio Grande across from Brownsville, Texas, a place where extreme violence is common thanks to the drug wars happening all around them. [The film is set in 2011, at the height of the violence.]
Crucial to the success of Radical is cinematographer Mateo Londono (The Valet, There Are No Saints), who shaped the rich visual narrative on display in Zalla’s film. Londono deployed vintage lenses and minimalistic lighting to create an authentic visual palette to bring Radical to life and integrate personal insights with Zala’s well-defined vision for the script.
“(Chris) has a fascinating way of building characters, through the use of details…and I made it part of the visual language of the film.”
For strategic planning, a shot list guided the process, focusing on blocking rather than storyboarding. This flexible approach allowed a balance between structure and spontaneity, which is particularly crucial in Zalla’s story about
“One of the most important aspects of the look of the film is that it’s spontaneous, and we did not want to kill that spontaneity, especially working with the kids. Scenes involving adult actors followed a more classic construction.”
Although the film unfolds in Matamoros on the Texas border, the actual shooting occurred in Veracruz, Mexico, where the waters of the Gulf of Mexico vary in moods — from Caribbean-like hues on some days to a more muted, brownish tone on others. A meticulous color correction process sought to unify them, ensuring a seamless portrayal of the film’s visual narrative.
Mateo Londono on set of “Radical.” Courtesy Pantelion Films.
“Blue symbolized possibility, while red conveyed the opposite. Those were the only colors that we gave an intentional meaning to.” Commenting on the almost muted shades of the film, he elaborated: “We tried to be very minimalistic…we intentionally avoided saturated colors. We actually tried to desaturate colors quite a bit. Not because we’re trying to make it look gritty but simply because we didn’t want it to be distracting. In this film, we tried to be as restrained as we could. We wanted the film to really be about the kids.”
Eugenio Derbez is Sergio in ‘Radical.’ Courtesy Pantelion Films.
The cinematographer honed in on the central theme of portraying life through the lens of the children. This deliberate choice, driven by the narrative’s focus on the trio of main characters – Paloma [Jennifer Trejo], Lupe [Mia Fernanda Solis], and Nico [Danilo Guardiola] – shaped the film’s language, with particular attention to the camera’s positioning. The majority of scenes involving the children maintained a low angle. “If you see any pictures of the behind the scenes of any of the camera operators, cameras are always by the belt, at the kids’ heights. We actually even measured our kids’ heights to have a range of where we wanted the camera to be.”
Danilo Guardiola is Nico and Mia Fernanda Solis is Lupe. Courtesy Pantelion Films.
The commitment to authenticity went beyond just camera placement and included a deliberate effort to avoid staged setups. This allowed the audience to experience the scene as if they were students in the classroom, a focal point that plays a substantial role in the film’s overall duration.
Capturing Radical‘s spontaneous essence involved a collaborative effort with skilled Mexican camera operators who brought a wealth of experience to the table. Utilizing two main cameras throughout the film, with an additional third camera dedicated to classroom scenes, Londono embraced a hands-on approach with the operators. Providing basic instructions while allowing them creative freedom, the collaboration resembled a dynamic interplay.
Eugenio Derbez is Sergio in “Radical.” Courtesy Pantelion Films.
Most of the kids had no prior acting experience and were unfamiliar with film cameras, which required a delicate approach. To mitigate any disruptions, the cameras were meticulously configured for minimal intrusion, with custom-built backpacks allowing the operators to seamlessly blend in with the kids. This strategy proved essential in fostering a natural environment, gradually easing the children into the filmmaking process.
To address the challenge of lighting the classrooms authentically, the cinematographer described a collaborative approach, emphasizing the minimal use of interior lighting. “We had lighting on both sides of the classroom, but we rarely put any lighting inside,” the cinematographer explained, highlighting a conscious effort to maintain authenticity. “A school with this budget would not randomly have their lights on all the time. We ultimately made the decision that the lights were just off all the time and that the light was coming from outside.”
Eugenio Derbez is Sergio in “Radical.” Courtesy Pantelion Films.
The cinematographer outlined his method in the intricate dance of capturing classroom scenes. “We put the three cameras on one side of the class and lit from that side. They had a 180-degree view to shoot. When we felt we had most of the scenes from that side, we turned the cameras to the other side, switched our lighting, and shot in that direction. Most classroom scenes followed this approach.”
On the set of “Radical.” Courtesy Pantelion FIlms.
The cinematographer acknowledged the initial challenge of relinquishing control by discussing the departure from the classic Hollywood style. “But one of the first things I had to do on this film was let go of control and let it happen more,” Londono said.
Detailing the commitment to minimalism, Londono and his gaffer deliberated on every scene, aiming for the “minimum amount of light.” He explained: “We were minimalistic where we could be and then where we couldn’t, we made sure that nothing ever looked fake. And that even went all the way to defining our choice of lenses.” This deliberate choice steered away from a clinically clean appearance that might compromise the film’s emotional impact. “They don’t match as well between each other; distortions are a little more exaggerated. They would flare differently.”
Mia Fernanda Solis and Jennifer Trejo in “Radical.” Courtesy Pantelion Films.
The discussion also delved into the film’s representation of harsh realities, emphasizing the director’s vision to maintain hope despite challenging circumstances. Scenes set in seemingly bleak locations, such as a trash dump, were intentionally framed to preserve optimism. The use of the sky as a visual element played a crucial role in conveying optimism and moving away from bleakness. Specific scenes, like Paloma taking Nico to the top of the trash pile, strategically utilize the sky to symbolize possibility and maintain a hopeful tone.
Reflecting on his responsibility in Radical, Londono reflected, “As a director of photography, you’re always inclined to want to make people look their best… to show off, but I think part of your job is to not stand in the way of the story.”
Eugenio Derbez is Sergio in “Radical.” Courtesy Pantelion Films.
At the end of our conversation, I asked Londono to use three words to describe the photography. Optimistic came rapidly as number one. After battling with how accurate “organic” would be but how cliche it sounds, “spontaneous” emerged as number two. And right after asking me what my pick was (it was “minimalistic”), he went for “restrained.” “I like restraint. And I think that it’s the hardest thing to do.”
It has been a very busy year for Brazilian-American film editor Affonso Gonçalves, from last fall’s twisted psychological drama Don’t Worry Darling to this year’s doppelgänger medical chiller Dead Ringers and queer wrestling biopic Cassandro. Last week, he returned with director Todd Haynes’ quietly disturbing psychological drama May December.
They have developed a shorthand after working with Haynes on six projects — including the Oscar-nominated Carol and the Emmy-winning Mildred Pierce. To focus on the demands of filming, Haynes does not watch dailies while he is shooting unless there is a technical problem or a performance issue, choosing to rely on his go-to editor instead. “He doesn’t like to watch the dailies, so I’m basically his eyes and ears while he is shooting. I’m cutting as they’re shooting, so by the time they finish, I have a cut ready to go,” Gonçalves reveals. “Then, once he’s done, he will watch all the dailies on DVDs by himself and puts together a version of the film that he has in mind. And then, we combine those and make a third and final version of the movie.”
Over the weekend at Deadline’s Contenders Film L.A., Haynes remarked that the film is about “the stories we tell ourselves” in a desperate attempt “to survive our lives.” Loosely based on the Mary Kay Letourneau case that was major 1990s tabloid fodder, the film follows 59-year-old Gracie (Julianne Moore), a housewife who appears happily married to 36-year-old husband, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), and their three college-age kids.
The façade of domestic bliss begins to crack with the arrival of TV actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) — who will be playing Gracie in an upcoming indie film — when we learn that the relationship began when Joe was just 13 years old (they met at a pet store) and one of their children was born behind bars. Hoping to launch her film career, Elizabeth will stop at nothing to nail her role as she seeks to ingratiate herself into the family’s lives, reawakening old wounds and traumas in her wake.
Cinematic influences incorporated into the film include Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Autumn Sonata, and Winter Light, as well as some of Jean-Luc Godard’s repertoire. “We don’t just talk about how we’re going to cut the film; there’s so much discussion about other films and ideas on sound and music, too. So, it’s always fun for me because I end up learning so much,” Gonçalves shares.
But it was Michel Legrand’s score for the 1971 Joseph Losey period drama, The Go-Between, that made an immense, singular impact. “The music was something Todd had in mind even before we started shooting. He wrote down in the script which part of the [1971 original] soundtrack should be used for each scene,” Gonçalves recalls. The jarring, portentous, and sometimes melodramatic music was exactly what Haynes was looking for to convey the awkwardness, suspense, and sense of doom that he often played it on set to establish the tone.
May December, Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
Legrand’s music further imbues the film in the sense that composer Marcelo Zarvo’s arresting score is adapted from the 1971 existing soundtrack, which also meant that Gonçalves already had an existing score to work with when he was cutting the film. “I had to kind of reverse-engineer the principles of editing because I knew I had to use the music. Usually, you would maneuver the music to fit your cutting. But in this case, I knew the music needed to be at a certain time and used in a certain way,” he says. “When Marcelo came in, he adapted it to make it a little more modern and very specific to the tone and pace of this film.”
May December, L to R: Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry with Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix
When Elizabeth first meets the family at their house in Savannah, Georgia, after a family BBQ, the adults all gather around the dinner table as she assures them that all she wants is to execute a faithful portrayal of their story so that the Yoo family can finally “feel seen and known.” “So much of that scene is character setup, how they function together. It’s a lot of dialogue between Elizabeth and Gracie, but Joe is there too, listening and reacting to what the women are talking about,” Gonçalves says, adding, “We probably cut that scene the most, try to give enough time for everybody. Sometimes, you understand someone just by their reactions. There is so much subtext in that scene; you can almost play it without sound, and you understand how they relate to each other. So, it was pivotal for us to get it right.”
May December, L to R: Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo with Charles Melton as Joe. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix
As Elizabeth injects herself further into Gracie and Joe’s lives, she begins to metamorphize into her “research” subject, soon mirroring Gracie’s every gesture and posture, even adopting her lisp. At one point, she asks Gracie to teach her how to apply her makeup, with both women standing in front of a bathroom mirror. “That was shot in one continuous shot. There’s an energy shift in that scene because they’re both pushing each other. And then Gracie becomes slightly annoyed; she gets the power when she applies the makeup onto Elizabeth, which makes her [Elizabeth] super uncomfortable,” Gonçalves notes. “We see the power dynamics between them. Elizabeth is getting a little too close to the fire in a way, while Gracie is trying to keep her distance but also show her that she is in control of what information she decides to share. It’s subtle. The way Julianne touches Natalie’s face when she is doing the makeup – the film is so much about boundaries.”
May December. (L to R) Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry and Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo in May December. Cr. Francois Duhamel / courtesy of NetflixMay December. (L to R) Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry and Charles Melton as Joe in May December. Cr. Francois Duhamel / courtesy of Netflix
The long-buried fissures in the marriage finally rupture when Joe bonds with his son while smoking a joint on the roof of their house. “That was an amazing scene between Joe and his son. From that point on, I think he’s very grounded in his feelings and how much he’s been impacted. He never had time to deal with everything that has happened, and now, he will be an empty nester. And how is that future gonna look like?” Gonçalves reveals the 20-plus years of confusion and trauma all gushing into this moment for Joe. “So that scene is pivotal for Joe as a character, and we really worked hard to get it right.”
May December, Charles Melton as Joe. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
Channeling the technique in Persona, there were several key scenes where the characters, in direct address to the lens, confront themselves and each other in mirrors. “Todd wanted that to feel a little uncomfortable, like are they looking at us or are they looking at each other? Because they weren’t actually looking at a mirror, there were no mirrors there. They were actually looking at the camera,” says Gonçalves of the film’s ingenious use of mirrors to explore the themes of self-reflection and identity. “It’s that uncomfortable feeling of somebody staring at you for maybe a little longer than they should. They’re really looking at each other and trying to understand the other person: Elizabeth is trying to become Gracie, and Gracie is trying to understand what Elizabeth wants. So, it’s kind of very unsettling and unnerving,” he elaborates.
One of these key scenes was Elizabeth’s second monologue in the film, where Portman performs as Gracie reading the only letter between the lovers that Joe had managed to save from all those years ago. “That was done in one shot, just different takes. There was no coverage. That was always what Todd had planned [for that scene], and Natalie just nailed it beautifully.”
May December is in theaters now and will stream on Netflix beginning on December 1st.
Featured image: May December, L to R: Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo with Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
May December (in select theaters now), which probes the interior lives of three enigmas aswirl in their own isolating truths, might be 2023’s most debatable movie. Rarely does anyone in Todd Haynes’ film say what they actually mean, and although it remains playful and accessible, an intriguing inscrutability hovers around the central characters.
Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a steely circus freak within her upper-middle-class Georgia community, has convinced herself that she is not liable for the liaison she had with a teenage boy while working at a pet store. That boy is now her husband, Joe (Riverdale‘s Charles Melton), a somewhat stunted 36-year-old who caters to Gracie’s volatility with compassion. Joe hardly admits — to himself or to Gracie — how he feels about their history. When a famous TV actress named Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) shows up to shadow Gracie before portraying her in what she insists will be a respectful movie, the seams of the couple’s life subtly unravel. May December doesn’t rest on some moral high ground, but it does impeach Hollywood leeches, predatory relationships, and tabloid projection. The latter is key because Gracie is based loosely on Mary Kay Letourneau, the Washington schoolteacher who, in 1997, pleaded guilty to raping her sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau, after which she gave birth in jail and later married him.
The female antiheroes in Samy Burch‘s Nesting Doll of a script evoke identity-swapping psychodramas like Persona and Mulholland Drive, while Haynes’ cheeky direction twists the melodrama tropes he employed in the comparatively refined Safe, Far From Heaven, and Carol. It’s fun to unpack what’s said — and, more crucially, what’s left unsaid — throughout May December, which opens with Elizabeth arriving at a barbeque that Gracie and Joe are hosting.
There’s a line toward the beginning that establishes both the tone of the movie and what Gracie’s mind is like. Do you know what I’m about to say?
The hot dogs.
Yes, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.” There’s a zoom and a dramatic music cue, and Julianne delivers the line like she’s found like a dead rat in her fridge. When you were writing it, did you intend for the line to be as crucial as Todd makes it?
The way it’s written in the script is something like, “A dark expression crosses Gracie’s face.” And then the next cut is the grill, and there are so, so many hot dogs. As a writer, I’m not thinking about the score or the camera, but the seed was there. It’s been a fun surprise to see the lines that people have been quoting.
May December, L to R: Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry with Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix
It really does tell us so much about Gracie. She makes it sound like a life-or-death crisis.
That’s our first clue, potentially, that there are mood swings or dramatics involved with this personality.
Many details about Gracie hew closely to the real Mary Kay Letourneau story, but I want to ask about a couple of changes. First, the pet store. Why not use the teacher-student dynamic?
In some ways, the person that I envisioned as Gracie — her personality, her spirit — didn’t feel like a teacher to me. But I also think there was a conscious effort to fictionalize this with all the little details. The big-picture details are similar, but I wanted to invent names, places, their history, their families, their jobs. Initially, the script took place in Camden, Maine. I always saw her as somebody from a wealthy family who had married a husband who was caring for her. There’s just this hyper-femininity. We get a sense that she likes purebred dogs, and I thought of a neighborhood shop where she’s helping out the elderly owner. She was kind of working at this pet store as a hobby. There was something tabloid-y about this pet-shop romance that felt right. There’s got to be a hook to these things. And the teacher-student thing is often in the news, and I wanted to diverge from that. Being a friend of his mom’s and having them in this really close, unusual location just felt like the right choice. I liked the idea of all these little animals, like all these little witnesses.
Another choice is Gracie’s lisp. Was that Julianne’s invention?
Totally Julianne’s invention, and a really amazing one, especially given that there was no rehearsal and this movie was shot in 23 days. You can imagine the complication of Natalie’s character having to study Julianne’s character. She’s also talked about this infantilizing quality that Gracie has, which is present throughout. She holds a lot of power, but there is this very childish element. I think Gracie plays into this little girl that needs to be saved. It’s essential to who she is.
May December, L to R: Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo with Charles Melton as Joe. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix
What kind of actress did you imagine Elizabeth to be in terms of fame and talent?
She went to Julliard, so I think there’s a certain base level of seriousness. She’s sort of an ingenue, probably on TV. She’s been on this show called Nora’s Ark. It’s an animal-hospital drama, and we kind of assume she’s the lead. It’s been on for a long time and is not good.
May December. Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry in May December. Cr. Francois Duhamel / courtesy of Netflix
Do you think she knows it’s not good?
Oh, I think she for sure knows. I think she’s very embarrassed by it, and what drives so much of this plot is that she’s got something to prove. And then, as it goes on, we get a sense that maybe this movie they’re making isn’t good, but the research she’s doing is very lofty — let alone trying to get to the truth of something impossible to really get to, even with the people involved. It’s hard to say what the limitations of her talent are. I think, in a lot of ways, she’s very limited by her doubt and her insecurity, even while she’s brazen in the way she disrupts these people’s lives. What I love so much in Natalie’s performance is those flashes of insecurity. In some ways, that’s the comedy, but it’s also the tragedy of that character.
May December, Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
Do you think she’s invested in Gracie as a person at all beyond the opportunity for her own success?
It’s a really complicated dynamic because there are a lot of ways they circle each other. I think they do like being seen by the other. They like the reflection of themselves in each other’s eyes. I think Elizabeth thinks, “This is the moment I become a serious actress respected by the world.” What I love when rewatching the movie is seeing Elizabeth’s micro-expressions during some of the most uncomfortable moments. There’s a flinch sometimes where we know that she knows this is very fucked-up. But everything is trumped by her experience here in this town and how she’s telling herself that this is what acting is. I think there’s not that much ethical quandary.
May December, L to R: Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo with Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
That raises another question: How much of this movie is ultimately about the way Hollywood exploits people’s life experiences?
A lot of it is. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s an indictment, but it calls into question the constant stream of mystery that is harvested from real people who are alive. In some ways, you can make an argument for that being a human desire and a cathartic one, given our society and how many horrible things can happen. And maybe there’s value to that storytelling, especially when it’s done well. It’s certainly not my intention for the main takeaway to be a scathing critique of true crime. It’s just interesting.
I feel like Joe would have been the most difficult character to write. Much of that character hinges on the performance, and yet he’s really the most sympathetic person despite not being particularly expressive. What unlocked Joe for you?
The honest truth is that he was the seed for me. I felt like I knew him right away. I felt like I had to protect him. A lot of that is in these very quiet moments. I love watching him watch This Old House. There’s an adolescence, obviously, to a lot of what we see him do. That was certainly part of the process of doing drafts once Todd was giving notes. Initially, I think Joe was able to articulate a little too much. Taking some of it back allows us to do that as the audience. The core idea of this movie is that this man is 36. He’s young enough to really be able to start over his life. He has not had a moment to process what happened to him or the media blitz that followed, which was probably unquantifiable. This moment, right before his last kids graduate from high school and they’re finally alone again, is the first time he can catch his breath, and he’s also crossing paths with this doppelgänger for his wife. There’s this eclipse that happens at age 36, the same age that Gracie was when they met. So they’re kind of on equal footing, and I think all of that is enough to shake loose something that he’s been trying so hard, subconsciously, to bury. I didn’t feel like I had to crack Joe because I felt like that’s what this was all about.
May December. (L to R) Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry and Charles Melton as Joe in May December. Cr. Francois Duhamel / courtesy of Netflix
One of the juiciest details that you do borrow from Mary Kay Letourneau comes from the TV interview where she badgers Vili to say that he was the one in charge of their early courtship. It’s a wild moment.
That came later. There was a lot of research that Todd, Julianne, and Sam Lisenco, the amazing production designer, did. It was a moment that Todd felt strongly about and placed in the scene. I was trying to figure out the story for myself, and then there were coincidences of things ringing true with the real case. The line that’s always been there is, “You seduced me,” which is one of my favorite moments in a theater because it gets such an audible reaction. It’s so upsetting. But “who was in charge?” was added later. It’s a very good clue into the story that Gracie tells herself about what happened. And Joe’s reaction is so truthful. He seems stunned by that. These moments in the film are really few and far between where someone says something honest, and it feels like a relief because so much is not being said.
May December is in select theaters now, and streams on Netflix on December 1.
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Featured image: May December. (L to R) Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry and Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo in May December. Cr. Francois Duhamel / courtesy of Netflix
Nicholas Hoult might pull off the rare feat of going from nearly playing Superman to playing his arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor. The talented Hoult had gotten far along in the casting process for the role of Superman, but ultimately, Gunn tapped David Corenswet to play Clark Kent, while Rachel Brosnahan snagged Lois Lane. Yet several outlets, including The Hollywood Reporterand Variety, report that Hoult began talks to play Lex Luthor before the actor’s strike began.
Superman: Legacy will be the first feature to come out of Gunn and Peter Safran’s new-look DC Studios, centering on a Clark Kent/Superman in a film that’s not being billed as an origin story but rather a look at how the young Kryptonian balances his alien heritage and his human family ties while defending the Earth as the world’s most powerful superhero.
Luthor’s legacy as a heavy is a storied one, dating back to his arrival on the scene when Jerry Spiegel and Joe Shuster created him for 1940’s “Action Comics No. 23.” On the big screen, Gene Hackman delivered a memorable performance playing opposite Christopher Reeves in Richard Donner’s 1978 classic Superman. Kevin Spacey took on the role of Luthor, pitting off against Brandon Routh’s Superman, in 2006’s Superman Returns, while Jesse Eisenberg played a younger version of Luthor in Zack Snyder’s 2016 film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Hoult is no stranger to the comic book movie world, having played the lovable Beast in several X-Men films between 2011 and 2019 for Marvel. He’s had a slew of memorable roles in Warner Bros. films, probably none quite as dynamic as playing Nux in George Miller’s flawless 2015 epic Mad Max: Fury Road.
Gunn recently cast María Gabriela de Faría to play the villain The Engineer in Superman: Legacy, joining the aforementioned cast and Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner/Green Lantern, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, Edi Gathegi as Mister Terrific, and Anthony Carrigan as Rex Mason/Metamorpho.
Superman: Legacy is slated for a July 11, 2025 release.
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